What I was trying to say was that the
typical text editor is quite small and simple compared to the typical word processor; think Notepad and Word, vi and StarOffice
?. Even VIM is tight and small compared to, say,
AbiWord. Emacs is something of an outlier, so I don't consider it a typical example. --
LDC
- Yes, but you could also contrast vi and Notepad in terms of complexity and feature set; Notepad has all of maybe 10 commands, vi has dozens if not hundreds. I haven't used AbiWord to know how it compares to Vim, but I've used Vim enough to regard it as quite complex. At any rate, I'm taking Notepad out of the list of "complex editors". I would substitute WordPad?, but it typically saves to RTF format instead of plaintext. --Wesley
WordPad? isn't a text editor at all, it's a word processor. Notepad is a text editor, and that's
exactly what the text said.
"Plain text" is a term of art with a specific meaning; "ASCII" doesn't clarify that, and in fact would
be wrong on non-ASCII machines. --LDC
Yes, yes, text editors can be complex. The article says that, and I don't disagree. They are,
however,
typically small and simple, and many people prefer small and simple ones, and that's
an important characteristic. They do not, however, "typically" lack formatting features of word
processors, they almost universally lack those features, and for good reason. --LDC
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